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The Socialist candidate, François Hollande, won a narrow victory in Sunday’s first round of France’s presidential elections, riding promises of economic growth and a general dislike for the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, into a favorable position before a runoff with Mr. Sarkozy on May 6. ...

Mr. Hollande finished with 28.5 percent of the ballots cast and Mr. Sarkozy with 27.1 percent, according to figures released by the Interior Ministry after the last polls closed. They were followed by Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front with 18.2 percent, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front party with 11.1 percent, the centrist François Bayrou with 9.1 percent and five other candidates with minimal support.

"I used to worry about the National Front,” a middle-aged writer told me when we met in France in February. “Suddenly I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not further to the right than they are.” The National Front, or FN, has been Europe’s archetypal fascistic party of recent years. Founded by Algerian War veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen, anathematized in the media, manipulated by Socialist president François Mitterrand as a means of dividing his opponents, it was embraced by ex-colonists, ex-Communists, and the unemployed as a vehicle for protesting the changes that mass immigration brought in its wake. Le Pen was offensive, clownish, unpredictable. He defended Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. He described the Holocaust as a “detail” of World War II. He walked onstage with a photo of the head of a Socialist minister on a platter. And in 2002, he shocked the country by taking 17 percent in the first round of the presidential election, finishing second and eliminating the Socialist candidate. That episode led to a national soul-searching that has not yet abated.

France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, seemed to stymie the FN’s appeal in the 2007 presidential election. In head-on style, he addressed the issues they professed to worry about, particularly immigration and the violent crime that most French people associate with it. The FN took a paltry 10 percent of the vote. Le Pen, now 82, retired this past winter, and his party appeared to be a closed chapter in French political life. Suddenly, however, the FN is the hottest political party in the country.

Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine, a 42-year-old lawyer and member of the European parliament, won the party’s leadership handily in January, beating a rival who represented the FN’s small Catholic wing. Ms. Le Pen, who has been divorced twice, claims to speak for a more “laic” sensibility. She lacks her father’s electoral baggage. She has explicitly repudiated the anti-Semitism in which the party stewed throughout his tenure. And she has gifts that her father never possessed. The elder Le Pen had only two oratorical registers—indignation and buffoonery. Marine Le Pen can give a moving speech. The one she gave at Tours on the day she was elected party leader was hailed as a triumph. What is more, she has a platform that a lot of French voters like and no other party will touch: Ms. Le Pen considers globalization a mistake, lock, stock, and barrel.